The Trip The Way I Wish It Had Gone, Part Six

Published early on our Previews page on Sunday, August 16, 2026.

Official publication date for the main page of our site: Saturday, August 22, 2026.

This story was submitted by Jack aka lkngjst@yahoo.com

To read the 1st part of this story, go to "The Trip The Way I Wish It Had Gone, Part One".

To read Jack's 1st story, go to "Love Affair With A Shoe".

"The Trip the Way I Wish It Had Gone"

Series. Fantasy framed as "what I wish had happened."

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## Part Six

I was at her door at nine on the dot. I'd thought about little else since the pool.

She opened it in a hotel robe, hair down, and she didn't let me past the threshold before she said, "Rules first." She liked rules, I was learning. "You get to take all the pictures you want. They stay on your phone, they're yours, and I never have to wonder where they went. That's the deal that lets me do this. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Say it back."

"They stay on my phone. They're mine. You never have to wonder." It came out steadier than I felt.

"Good." She stepped back and let the robe fall open, and I forgot how to breathe.

White stockings, the real kind, to mid-thigh. The deep burgundy on her toes, almost black in the low light, exactly the red I'd described at dinner like she'd taken notes. The barefoot jewelry from the pool was gone now — this was the other half of the box, the after-dark half, and somehow the bare expanse of stocking with nothing on it but that dark polish at the end was even more than the gold had been.

"This afternoon was the tease," she said. "This is the rest. And — last night you gave me mine. Tonight I want to watch you take yours."

I got my phone out with hands that weren't entirely cooperating, and she let me. She posed without being asked, because of course she did — pointed her toes, arched the stocking against the white sheets, drew one leg slow over the other. She knew what she had. She'd known since the lobby. The difference now was she was aiming all of it straight at the one man who'd lose his mind over it, and watching me come apart was clearly doing as much for her as it was for me.

I put the phone down eventually because I couldn't stand to keep her at arm's length any longer. I went to the floor in front of the bed, and this time there was nothing rushed about it. I took one foot in both hands, the stocking smooth under my thumbs, the burgundy catching the lamp, and I took my time the way I'd promised I would. The arch. The heel. Each toe through the silk. She made a sound above me I hadn't heard from her yet, lower, less in control.

"You can't even imagine," she said, breathless, "how long I've wanted someone to want this as much as you do."

I could, actually. That was the whole thing. Two people who'd each spent years keeping a door shut, on opposite sides of it, finally standing in the same room — and who'd spent the last two nights opening each other's, one at a time.

There was a moment, later, when she pulled the cord from the robe she'd dropped and pressed it into my hand with a look that was half dare, half question. New territory for both of us, and we kept it simple — a loose loop around her wrists, nothing she couldn't slip if she wanted to, more idea than restraint. But the way she let her arms go still above her head, the way she handed me that much trust on a Thursday in a hotel, undid me more than the stockings had.

The curtains were open. Thirteen floors up, the Valley lit underneath us, nobody close enough to see and both of us aware they theoretically could. She caught me notice.

"Leave them open," she said.

So we left them open.

I'm not going to write down every minute of it. Some of it belongs only to that room. But I'll say this: it was the first time in longer than I want to admit that I got to be all of myself at once — the worship, the wanting, the part I'd spent twenty years making small — with someone who wasn't tolerating it but feeding on it. She finished with my name in her mouth and her toes curled tight in those stockings, and I'd have been content to die right there on the thirteenth floor.

Afterward she lay sprawled and wrecked and grinning, one stockinged leg thrown over mine, the city light still on us.

"Don't delete those pictures," she said, eyes closed.

"Wasn't going to."

"And tomorrow's the last night." Her grin faded a notch into something more honest. "We should probably talk about that part."

"Tomorrow," I said.

"Tomorrow." She pulled my arm tighter around her. "Tonight you don't get to think about anything but this."

*To be continued.*

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